


Memory

by Dantalionax



Category: The Order: 1886
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, F/M, Post-Game(s), god-awful purple prose
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-15
Updated: 2019-06-15
Packaged: 2020-05-12 07:57:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,223
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19224931
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dantalionax/pseuds/Dantalionax
Summary: 2 December 1886: An attack is mounted on the Palace of Westminster. Lady Igraine charges off to meet the danger head on, but arrives too late.





	Memory

**Author's Note:**

> Based on the results of missing the initial inputs in the final encounter with Sir Lucan, netting this extended failure sequence:
> 
> https://changertheelder.tumblr.com/post/115143266423/a-game-shouldnt-reward-you-for-failing-this-well
> 
> Initially thought it was the real ending. Nope, turns out I'm just terrible at QTE's, but the idea and the what if stayed anyways.

Of course she ran when the first explosions rocked through the palace.

 

Of course it was rebels, as if there was anyone else that would attack them in broad daylight.

 

Of course her father had told her to evacuate with the Lords and the Parliament. She had considered this, but when she realized where the gunfire and raucous sounds of combat had all issued from, she ignored him and took off sprinting to reach it against the flood of fleeing clerks and panicking blue-bloods.

 

Isabeau d'Argyll had only one brother, and the Order had only one Nikola Tesla, both far too valuable to allow the rebellion to take.

 

The laboratory was so far away, she had rarely visited it and not once been there during its current occupant's tenancy. The scent of ozone and gunpowder and the noises guided her through the labyrinth of hallways, bounding down stairs two and three at a time as much as her memories did.

 

Closer she came, through the final flight. Voices, she heard, Tesla's boyish brightness and her brother's familiar timbre, words incomprehensible but there. It should have slowed her scrabbling descent, but there was nothing that could stop her momentum now. 

 

Of course, there was an exception, in the form of a third voice.  _ The convict _ . The sound rattled and surged through her, knocking her off balance as sure as it came on an explosive shockwave. She skidded and slipped, tumbling across the stones worn smooth by hundreds of years of footfalls and falling with a rough thump. 

 

The impact took the wind out of her, among other things. When Isabeau picked herself back up the fear and love that had driven her here had gone, replaced entirely by utter blind fury. She rose in a sticky, red fog, feeling it beading cold on her skin and white-hot at the back of her throat. Isabeau wouldn't put anything past the convict, but coming back to the palace for revenge was exceptionally bold. He would pay for all he had done, in blood, and she would be the instrument. For the Agamemnon, and all its lives, for the destruction at the docks. For Malory. For herself.

 

Tesla's lab had been tossed. She had seen it before like this, then it had been the man’s own doing that saw every light bulb shattered and smoking. Arcs of blue lightning gave off spastic flares of visibility, showing smashed workbenches, chairs and card catalogs, broken weaponry and things she didn’t recognize strewn around. As she rounded an overturned table the convict  _ dared _ look her in the eye. The momentary distraction was all her brother needed. His knife glinted and plunged into the convict's belly. Alastair grasped the man's face, whispering something as he twisted and drove the blade to the hilt.

 

No! Had she shouted or only thought it? It resonated raw and raspy in her mind as she hurtled across the room, slamming into her brother and knocking him out of the way. With the man she had called mentor broken on the ground actions trained into instinct took over. She wrenched the knife out in a motion as violent as the one that had put it there, blood on the handle flinging it out of her hand as it came free. Blood, how was there so much already? Dripping, flowing, coating her shaking hands, somehow adhering the clothing together and making everything too slippery to grasp. It reduced her to pawing at the man's chest, trying to extract the little silver vial that had to lay under the layers of leather and fabric on the tiny chain that kept out of her fingers. He brought up a hand in a feeble gesture, still trying to fight off his assailant. The effort was short as it slid away down her arm, and then fell over hers at his chest. His large hand engulfed hers, settling into place as it always had. Their fingers interlaced, a gentle, timeless motion neither had expected to make again.

 

From that grasp, something radiant flowed through Isabeau, an incandescent wave rolling through her limbs and upward across her spine. When it rose out through her scalp, making the hair on her neck stand up as it passed, the anger went with it and she could finally see again.

 

"Gray?" She murmured, voice crackling worse than it ever had over the comms. A tentative squeeze of her hand came in reply. Eyes she had known well gazed up into hers, glinting with a spark of recognition. Then she felt his free hand come to rest against her head, fingers threading across her braid.

 

“Isi, love?” A disbelieving, choked whisper, with a rivulet of blood from the side of his mouth following it. It cut an ugly, jagged red line through the laugh lines across his face, trailing away across the scar on his jaw Isabeau would never know the story of. 

“ ‘m sorry…” He gave a final rattling wheeze, and then, Grayson stilled.

  
  


She did not know how long she stayed there, or when the weight of Grayson’s hand that had fallen to her shoulder was replaced by her brother’s. Alastair knelt beside her and delicately freed her hand from Gray’s grasp, and brought her to her feet. Isabeau rose, feeling lightheaded, hollowed. The void was replaced by a dull roar that flooded in that she recognized as the sound of her own blood flow. “It’s over, Isabeau. Come, let’s get you away from this place.” She knew it was Alastair speaking but it barely registered. The strange howl washing over her hearing blunted any other noises, like she was submerged in the ocean. 

 

Somehow he guided her up the narrow, worn stairs she had so sprightly bounded down and somehow, her father was there at the top to receive her. “You have done well, my daughter” He said, settling Isabeau into an embrace. It made little sense, she thought, but nothing did. Not the attack, not Gray’s role, neither Alastair’s actions nor the quaking tremors in her hands couldn't seem to stop. She expected there to be tears, but none came.

 

The shaking did not cease for months.

 

The tears, she began to think, never would. They did not come in the weeks later when she served in the honor guard repatriating Tesla’s body. They did not come in the decades later, when her father was killed and left her his heir, even when her first action as the Order’s new leader was to declare Sir Lucan missing.

 

They came on a day far ahead in time, in a room full of unfamiliar faces with an unfamiliar man knelt before her. In her hands, a velvet-lined box that she withdrew a familiar silver vial that glinted red for a moment before being reclaimed by the Blackwater. They flowed, and flowed, roughening her voice and choking her delivery in the ceremony, but they would not be stopped. The man looked up, puzzled, but accepted the vial with both hands and drank.

 

“I dub thee Sir Galahad,  _ fourth _ of his name. Rise, and take your rightful place at our table.” There was silence, a bit of confusion in the room, even. Had Lady Igraine made an error? Lost count in her many years? 

No, she had not. She smiled.

 

Because, of course, she never forgot.


End file.
